@aimemavie: "Charles Glass: Negotiation is the only way to free the hostages
The long-term solution to the kidnapping of Westerners in Iraq is what
it was in Lebanon
28 September 2004
Tony Blair may have put his finger on the obstacle to freeing Ken
Bigley from his captors in Iraq when he said: "There is no need in
raising false hopes, because of the nature of the people we're dealing
with." The people he is dealing with, of course, are in Washington. It
would be difficult to design policies more certain to prevent Mr
Bigley's safe return that those which the Bush administration is
pursuing in Iraq.
First, they assassinated the spiritual leader of Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi's Jamaat Tawhid wal Jihad (Unity and Holy Struggle Group).
This is the organisation responsible for abducting Mr Bigley and two
American colleagues, Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong.
Second, they prevented the interim Iraqi administration - itself a
creature of Washington - from allowing its courts to release two
female detainees when the kidnappers were demanding that all women in
Iraqi and US prisons be freed. (Iraqi officials had said they had no
evidence to justify holding the women, until American officials
weighed in to persuade the new Iraqi administration not to be seen to
be yielding to terrorism. The interim government, despite its nominal
independence, yielded to the US.)
Third, US forces have repeatedly bombed Fallujah, where they say the
kidnappers' organisation is based. Would such bombings - which Agence
France Press reported had killed 15 Iraqi civilians on Sunday and 11
the day before - provoke extreme reaction or make it easier for the
kidnappers to respond to humanitarian appeals from Mr Bigley's family,
the Muslim Council of Britain, the singer Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens)
and many others since his kidnapping on 16 September?
Iyad Allawi, the former Baathist, former CIA asset and current interim
Prime Minister of Iraq, voiced a policy that will please his masters
in Washington: "We have not been negotiating, and we will not
negotiate, with terrorists on the release of hostages." Why not?
Everyone who wants hostages to return home alive negotiates with
kidnappers. It happened over the American embassy hostages in Iran in
1979. It happened in Beirut during the 1980s, when many Britons and
Americans - including myself - became captives of the Shia Muslim
Hizbollah (Party of God). It happens almost every day in the United
States, where police and other mediators negotiate as long as possible
with criminal or psychotic kidnappers to keep hostages alive.
Negotiate is what you do when you want to save hostages' lives. If
not, you leave them to rot.
As the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, admits, violence in Iraq
is escalating. More and more Iraqis and some Arabs from other
countries are intensifying the battle against American-British
occupation. The conflict has killed a thousand American soldiers and
many more Iraqis. A recent report by the Iraqi Ministry of Health
concluded that, between April and September this year, American troops
had killed twice as many Iraqi civilians as the insurgents had. The
insurgents have targeted those - the new police, army and civil
administration - whom they see as collaborating with the American
project. But the Americans have caused two-thirds of the 3,487 Iraqi
civilian deaths recorded by the ministry. The US Knight-Ridder news
agency, which published details of the report on Saturday, quoted a
ministry official: "Anyone who hates America has come here to fight:
Saddam's supporters, people who don't have jobs, other Arab fighters.
All these people are on our streets. But everyone is afraid of the
Americans, not the fighters. And they should be."
The treatment of Iraqi prisoners in American custody - typified by the
Abu Ghraib scandal that the Bush administration has relegated to
political insignificance in the US - has exacerbated tensions in Iraq.
It has also made taking civilians from the other, Western side more
acceptable to Iraqis.
Sheikh Abdel Sattar Abdel Jabbar, an Iraqi Sunni religious scholar and
opponent of American occupation, condemned the kidnapping of two
French journalists and two female Italian aid-workers in Iraq. "They
are innocent," he said on al-Jazeera television. However, the sheikh
distinguished them from Mr Bigley and the two Americans whom the
kidnappers beheaded. The three Westerners worked for Gulf Services
Company of the United Arab Emirates on a contract to build and support
an American military base north of Baghdad. Sheikh Abdel Sattar said
that they were men "who build bases to wage war on the Iraqi people".
However, in war, no one is allowed to murder unarmed prisoners. This
is as true for Muslims as for Christians and atheists.
The long-term solution to the kidnapping of Westerners in Iraq is what
it was in Lebanon: the foreign armies should leave. Hizbollah stopped
kidnapping foreigners in 1991, when it released Terry Waite and Terry
Anderson. Their freedom took place against a background of Israel's
withdrawal from most of Lebanon and the successful negotiations by the
United Nations mediator, Giandomenico Pico, with Hizbollah's
benefactors in Iran.
In the short term, Britain could hold secret contacts with the
militants or their go-betweens. The US could help all hostages and
future hostages by committing itself to observe and enforce the Geneva
Conventions on Prisoners of War and call upon the insurgents to do the
same. This would allow international oversight of prisoners on both
sides. But that would mean recognising the insurgents as
co-belligerents in a war that the US prefers to say is against no
people at all - only against an apparition called terror.
The writer wasa hostage in Lebanon in 1987 
"There are a lot of concepts the French apparently don't have words
for - like stabbing one in the back."
Kentucky (chicken) george resorting to Nazi slogans to demonise France."
    @Z: "No negotiations with hostage takers, it just causes more hostages.
The situation in Iraq is proof.
If no country or company had buckled under & gave in to the demands at first
then we would not have any hostages taken now.
Spain is the one that started it & they should take blame for the deaths as
well as the Muslim Terrorists.
Z
news:<email_address>
<quote>"
    @George: ""Z" <email_address> wrote in message news:<email_address>
<quote>
The solution to the hostage problem in Iraq is to take away the political and 
financial incentive these bozos have to commit their crimes.  Negotiations won't 
do that.  If someone is kidnapped in Iraq, they are as good as dead.  Anyone who 
doesn't understand this needs to get out right now. "
    @magnulus: "  "Tawid and Jihad" means "Monotheism and Holy War".  Jihad doesn't mean
anything but "holy war".  All this talk about "struggle" is ridiculous."
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